Fenris Creations: Finalizing MBO, Rebranding, and Partnership with Google DeepMind
Iceland-based PC & Console games developer CCP Games has completed its management buyout from South Korea-based games company Pearl Abyss (KOSDAQ: 293490) for $120m ($100m cash plus $20m in token acquisition rights), simultaneously rebranding as Fenris Creations and announcing a minority equity participation by UK-based AI research company Google DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL). The transaction closed on May 6, 2026. Aream & Co. and Arion Bank are acting as financial advisors to Fenris Creations, and LOGOS is providing legal counsel.
We covered the buyout terms and Pearl Abyss’s strategic rationale in our previous digest. The $120m exit represented a substantial markdown on the original investment. At $120m against EVE Online‘s 2025 revenue of $70m+, the transaction implies a ~1.7x LTM revenue multiple, consistent with the low end of pricing for mature, single-IP live-service studios with plateauing but stable monetization.
The structural novelty in this deal is Google DeepMind’s entry as a minority backer. The partnership is framed as a research collaboration: DeepMind will use an offline version of EVE Online on local servers to study long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning in a complex, dynamic environment. EVE Online‘s persistent, player-driven economy and 20-year behavioral dataset make it a credible research substrate for frontier AI models in ways that purpose-built synthetic environments cannot replicate. The rebranded studio enters this next phase from a position of financial strength: EVE Online recorded its second-highest revenue quarter in its 20-year history in Q4’25, growing 19% year-over-year, with Nov’25 as a record month.
This may be the first time a frontier AI research lab has taken an equity stake in a games studio specifically to use a live game as a research environment. We have tracked AI’s growing presence in gaming in our report — $1.8B deployed across 178 startups between 2020 and 2024 — almost entirely directed at in-game content generation and development infrastructure, not arrangements of this kind. The equity structure, rather than a straightforward licensing deal, signals that DeepMind sees long-term access to and influence over the environment as strategically valuable. If the results from the EVE Online environment prove publishable and defensible, it is reasonable to expect other frontier labs to pursue similar arrangements with studios running the right kind of persistent world. We will be watching how the Fenris Creations partnership develops — and whether comparable deals start appearing across the sector.
